I think, then, that it has been pretty well established not only that
our Saviour was to be born of a virgin, but also that there were
prophets among the Jews who uttered not merely general predictions about
the future,—as _e.g._ regarding Christ and the kingdoms of the world,
and the events that were to happen to Israel, and those nations which
were to believe on the Saviour, and many other things concerning
Him,—but also prophecies respecting particular events; as, for instance,
how the asses of Kish, which were lost, were to be discovered, and
regarding the sickness which had fallen upon the son of the king of
Israel, and any other recorded circumstance of a similar kind. But as a
further answer to the Greeks, who do not believe in the birth of Jesus
from a virgin, we have to say that the Creator has shown, by the
generation of several kinds of animals, that what He has done in the
instance of one animal, He could do, if it pleased Him, in that of
others, and also of man himself. For it is ascertained that there is a
certain female animal which has no intercourse with the male (as writers
on animals say is the case with vultures), and that this animal, without
sexual intercourse, preserves the succession of race. What
incredibility, therefore, is there in supposing that, if God wished to
send a divine teacher to the human race, He caused Him to be born in
some manner different from the common?[1187] Nay, according to the
Greeks themselves, all men were not born of a man and woman. For if the
world has been created, as many even of the Greeks are pleased to admit,
then the first men must have been produced not from sexual intercourse,
but from the earth, in which spermatic elements existed; which, however,
I consider more incredible than that Jesus was born like other men, so
far as regards the half of his birth. And there is no absurdity in
employing Grecian histories to answer Greeks, with the view of showing
that we are not the only persons who have recourse to miraculous
narratives of this kind. For some have thought fit, not in regard to
ancient and heroic narratives, but in regard to events of very recent
occurrence, to relate as a possible thing that Plato was the son of
Amphictione, Ariston being prevented from having marital intercourse
with his wife until she had given birth to him with whom she was
pregnant by Apollo. And yet these are veritable fables, which have led
to the invention of such stories concerning a man whom they regarded as
possessing greater wisdom and power than the multitude, and as having
received the beginning of his corporeal substance from better and
diviner elements than others, because they thought that this was
appropriate to persons who were too great to be human beings. And since
Celsus has introduced the Jew disputing with Jesus, and tearing in
pieces, as he imagines, the fiction of His birth from a virgin,
comparing the Greek fables about Danae, and Melanippe, and Auge, and
Antiope, our answer is, that such language becomes a buffoon, and not
one who is writing in a serious tone.
Footnote 1187:
Πεποίηκεν ἀντὶ σπερματικοῦ λόγου, τοῦ ἐκ μίξεως τῶν ἀῤῥένων ταῖς
γυναιξὶ, ἄλλῳ τρόπῳ γενέσθαι τὸν λόγον τοῦ τεχθησομένου.